Apple’s legendary Lisa computer was a flop by commercial standards, but its influence on computing cannot be underestimated. In the 40 years after her debut, Lisa’s ideas changed our relationship with computers, making her design more human-centric. If you’re reading this on a computer screen, her experience was probably shaped in some way by Lisa’s forged lessons.
Today, in association with the Computer History Museum, we’re excited to share another part of what makes Lisa feel, well, human– A selection of exclusive Polaroid photos of Lisa’s development taken by Bill Atkinson, the designer and developer of the computer’s graphical user interface. Atkinson sat down with CHM for an interview about his time at Apple and offered a tour of his photo album. We’ve chosen some of our favorite photos from the collection along with selected comments from Atkinson’s interview.
In this collection, you’ll see a rare look inside the development of one of the most important computers ever created, from experiments with 3D graphics to cutting-edge user interface designs. Now we take all of these things for granted, but at the time these photos were taken, the camera was capturing things that few human beings had ever seen. It’s hard to imagine this scene on today’s finely orchestrated Apple campus, but in Lisa’s time, Atkinson worked on the project at home and rode his Polaroids around on a motorcycle to share progress with the rest of the team.
Steve Jobs once said that “we are here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise why even be here? Atkinson says this kind of energy led him to Apple when Jobs recruited him and his friend Jeff Raskin invited him to visit the company. “I said no way,” Atkinson told CHM. But his resistance to the idea was short-lived. “I was working on a PhD in neuroscience, and he sent me round-trip airfare and my dad lived nearby in Los Gatos, so I thought what the hell, I’ll drop by for a weekend.”
“Well, Steve spent the whole day with me, and what he said then was what lifted me up,” says Atkinson. “[Steve] He said: What you read in the tech news actually happened two years before. There is a time lag between when something is invented and when something is made available to the public. If you want to change the world for the better, you have to get ahead of that delay. And then he gave me a visual. He said: think about how much fun it is to surf on the leading edge of a wave and how much fun it is to paddle like a dog on the tail of the same wave. Come to Apple and you can change the lives of millions of people.”
“Literally two weeks later, I had left my PhD program. I moved to Silicon Valley from Seattle and was working at Apple Computer. I knew from the beginning that what we were doing was going to change the world in a good way.”
“Without Lisa, there would never have been a Mac.”
